The increasing complexity of personal financial transactions has spurred the continuous development of various financial management tools. Historically, individuals have debited and credited their accounts by using drafts and negotiable instruments in writing (i.e., on paper), or by directly withdrawing funds from the particular banks where their accounts reside. Today, individuals enjoy many more options for transferring funds from accounts. For example, debits and credits can be performed with automated teller machines, electronic transfer of funds, credit cards, and debit cards. To facilitate the increased technological complexity of financial transactions, software programs have been developed that automate many of the steps necessary to record and organize personal and business finances.
Effective financial management programs must efficiently enable recordation or entry of an individual's various financial transactions. Generally, the software must track transactions and maintain balances for various accounts that are created by a user. Further, most such software programs enable an individual to calendar recurring transactions, such as payments to a utility, that are consistently made at the same time interval. Once a scheduled or calendared transaction has been entered by the user, the program will automatically prompt the user to enter the transaction in the financial data, while enabling the user to modify parameters such as the actual date of the payment or credit, or the amount of the transaction.
In the prior art financial management programs, the individual must identify and manually enter all recurring financial transactions into the program. Unfortunately, there are several inherent problems with this method. First, many users may not have the time to adequately learn the proper steps for entering recurring financial transactions and may not even know that the capability exists in the program to do so. Second, users may have difficulty identifying the transactions that are recurring. Lastly, users may not accurately enter the financial information for a recurring transaction, such as the name of the payee, the time period, the financial category, or the account.
There is an inherent difficulty in identifying similar transactions that recur at regular intervals of time. For example, a user may pay periodically recurring bills on different days of a month, even though such bills are typically due on about the same time each month. However, the due date of a bill can vary if the date falls on a weekend or a holiday. Any significant error in automatically identifying recurring financial transactions is likely to cause the user to ignore a suggestion to schedule a recurring transaction in response to a suggestion to do so by the financial management program. Accordingly, it is important to minimize the incidence of error in the automatic identification of such transactions.